Loyola Marymount Takes First Lease at Playa Vista’s Brickyard Offices

Loyola Marymount has signed a 12-year lease at the Brickyard office building in Playa Vista.

Playa Vista’s newest office building recently wrapped up construction, and now it has snagged its first tenant.

Loyola Marymount University is taking a 12-year lease for more than 50,000 square feet at the Brickyard with plans for a June move-in, according to a statement from the building’s owner, Tishman Speyer. The space will house LMU’s School of Film and Television graduate programs.

LMU’s monthly rate is roughly $5.50 a square foot, according to a source familiar with the transaction. Tishman declined to disclose lease terms.

Average monthly rents in Playa Vista were about $4.91 a square foot in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to data from Jones Lang LaSalle.

LMU’s main campus sits on the hills overlooking Playa Vista. It also runs Loyola Law School downtown. The new site, at 12105 W. Waterfront Drive, is intended to help students connect with companies based in the Silicon Beach area of Playa Vista, Venice, and Santa Monica.

“Silicon Beach is one of the world's fastest-growing startup ecosystems, an ideal counterpart for LMU as the definitive center for global imagination and its impacts,” Timothy Law Snyder, LMU’s president, said in a statement.

The Film and Television building’s official opening is slated for fall 2018, the university said.

Designed by Los Feliz-based architect Michael Maltzan, the Brickyard encompasses 400,000 square feet across two buildings.

In addition to being the latest major construction project in Playa Vista, it may also be among the last, since development space is nearly gone. The one major plot of land that remains is a 12-acre parcel owned by Google, near the historic Spruce Goose hangar that the tech company is leasing and converting into office space.

Tishman, a mega-landlord based in New York that owns Rockefeller Center, also owns the Collective in Playa Vista, a 204,000-square-foot complex of five office buildings that it built in 2015.

“The creative office environment that has unfolded in Playa Vista has been incredible to witness over the past 10 years,” John Miller, Tishman Speyer’s senior managing director, said in a statement.